Commentary: The Truth About Russia’s New ‘Global Fact-Checking Network’
Russia’s initiative is not fact-checking, writes NewsGuard AI and Foreign Influence Editor McKenzie Sadeghi. It’s an effort to defend Russian disinformation.
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Commentary: The Truth About Russia’s New ‘Global Fact-Checking Network’
Russia’s long-term objective in the global information war has never been to convince the world of its version of events. Instead, it seeks to erode the very idea that objective truth exists. The Kremlin’s goal, as described by British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, is to create a world where “nothing is true and everything is possible.”
This strategy was on display on April 9, 2025, when TASS (NewsGuard Trust Score: 15/100), a Russian government run wire service, and the Russian nonprofit ANO Dialog, previously sanctioned by the European Union for spreading disinformation, launched the “Global Fact-Checking Network” (GFCN). Apparently modeling itself after the International Fact-Checking Network in the West, Russia’s GFCN, which has not been previously reported on by Western media outlets, describes itself as “an international association whose activities are aimed at objective and unbiased verification of information.”
The GFCN’s “experts” consist of Kremlin-aligned propagandists who have spent years pushing disinformation, not correcting it. These include Dutch independent journalist Sonja van den Ende, who spread the false claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife went on a New York shopping spree at Cartier, and Juan Antonio Aguilar, who pushed the false claim that Zelensky’s wife bought a Bugatti car in France.
As fact-checkers in the U.S. are laid off and tech platforms scale back content moderation efforts, Russia is seizing the moment — not to debunk falsehoods, but to discredit the very concept of fact-checking. The playbook is to flood the field with fake referees until no one believes the score. When anyone can call themselves a “fact-checker,” the label becomes meaningless.
Take one of the GFCN’s debut “fact-checks” by van den Ende titled “ChatGPT is prone to Russian propaganda?” The GFCN “debunked” an article from Norwegian outlet NRK that noted ChatGPT’s tendency to cite TASS in its responses. Rather than addressing TASS’s well-documented role as a state propaganda outlet, the GFCN article defended TASS as an “international news agency with more than 1,700 employees” with “its own office aboard the International Space Station.”
The “fact-check” did not debunk a provably false claim. It tried to defend TASS. That is not fact-checking. It is reputation management masquerading as journalism.
It remains unclear how GFCN will decide which claims to cover and which to ignore. Will it address viral Russian-backed falsehoods such as the baseless claim that Zelensky purchased the Highgrove House estate from King Charles III? At NewsGuard, our analysts called the estate directly, interviewed staff, and confirmed with a Buckingham Palace source that the claim was false. That’s what fact-checking looks like when it’s grounded in transparency, human sourcing, and journalistic standards.
The GFCN did get one thing right in its launch announcement. It said it conducted a survey finding that “one in five Russians encounters fake news weekly.” What it left out is the explanation: Russia’s own prolific output of propaganda, which the Kremlin is estimated to spend $1 billion on this year, according to Russia’s 2025 draft budget.
In short, Russia is not engaging in fact-checking. It’s co-opting the concept of fact checking in order to undermine it. If the public loses faith in the concept of verification, facts cease to matter. The real danger isn’t that people will believe Russia’s version of events — it’s that they’ll stop believing any version, even from trustworthy sources.
McKenzie Sadeghi is the AI and Foreign Influence Editor at NewsGuard.
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